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What a negative view of the web and the world, and with the wrong interpretation. What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of ca

by vasco 5y ago

What a negative view of the web and the world, and with the wrong interpretation. What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of cats, your aunt being able to get video instructions of how to replace a car tire, open-source software, and an explosion of tools that are getting more sophisticated by the minute, to the point that during a global pandemic, a lot of office jobs almost seamlessly moved fully remote, even if for a while. Yes, someone needs to tackle those issues you've mentioned, but by and large your description of the internet is not accurate to global use we get from it.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago
You ignore sock puppets, troll farms, social manipulation by malicious actors, CP, literally wasting the energy consumption of Argentina to hash transactions to make money, the anti-vax insanity enabled by echo chambers, and god knows what else.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Nasrudith 5y ago
  With the exception of hash energy waste you ignore their preexistence in society. Seriously, the people who find the internet the well of all sorrows keep on forgetting history beyond the remmit of their personal nostalgia. Disturbingly look at netherlands in the 1971-1987 child pornography was outright legal and had Lolita magazine openly existing. Look up Joop Wilhelmus, the infamous proprietor of it. Somehow it remained legal for 55 magazine issues.
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    I believe that you ignore the scale of the things that are happening. To achieve the same "harm" then, as now, one needed significantly more money, and resources than they need today, and it was significantly more obvious. We should also not forget everything that's happening on 4chan (/b/, /x/, /pol/), and the like. Countless trolling that resulted in suicides with zero repercussions, doxxing, incidents like the one that lead us to "we did it reddit", QAnon, and so on. To ignore the scale and claim that it was happening then so nothing changes is dishonest.
noduerme 5y ago
Isn't it more like an arms race between the two? It's hard to watch a cat video these days without having auto-play show you a conspiracy theory, one or two videos later...
lariati 5y ago
If the idea of happiness is never having to leave the house then the past 25 years have been great.
JohnBooty 5y ago
What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of cats Totally orthogonal. Your statement is about as insightful as stating, "no... pants didn't win. shoes won!" There were always multiple things that were going to "win," right? The web/internet was always going to be some mixture of entertainment (cat GIFs, etc), commerce, communication, and information. They do not compete with each other in meaningful ways. As you say, yes, there is a lot of great utility out there. I can look up how to fix anything in my house on YouTube. That's super cool, and it has made my life tangibly better. But as for advertisements and other sorts of information, the outcome is a lot darker. From the article: Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous glaring billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's scrapbook. Tell me, with a straight face, that the overwhelming majority of the modern web isn't the digital form of exactly that.

by vasco 5y ago

PartiallyTyped 5y ago

You ignore sock puppets, troll farms, social manipulation by malicious actors, CP, literally wasting the energy consumption of Argentina to hash transactions to make money, the anti-vax insanity enabled by echo chambers, and god knows what else.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Nasrudith 5y ago
With the exception of hash energy waste you ignore their preexistence in society. Seriously, the people who find the internet the well of all sorrows keep on forgetting history beyond the remmit of their personal nostalgia. Disturbingly look at netherlands in the 1971-1987 child pornography was outright legal and had Lolita magazine openly existing. Look up Joop Wilhelmus, the infamous proprietor of it. Somehow it remained legal for 55 magazine issues.
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  I believe that you ignore the scale of the things that are happening. To achieve the same "harm" then, as now, one needed significantly more money, and resources than they need today, and it was significantly more obvious. We should also not forget everything that's happening on 4chan (/b/, /x/, /pol/), and the like. Countless trolling that resulted in suicides with zero repercussions, doxxing, incidents like the one that lead us to "we did it reddit", QAnon, and so on. To ignore the scale and claim that it was happening then so nothing changes is dishonest.

noduerme 5y ago

Isn't it more like an arms race between the two? It's hard to watch a cat video these days without having auto-play show you a conspiracy theory, one or two videos later...

lariati 5y ago

If the idea of happiness is never having to leave the house then the past 25 years have been great.

JohnBooty 5y ago

What won wasn't conspiracy theories and scammy ads. What won was videos of cats Totally orthogonal. Your statement is about as insightful as stating, "no... pants didn't win. shoes won!" There were always multiple things that were going to "win," right? The web/internet was always going to be some mixture of entertainment (cat GIFs, etc), commerce, communication, and information. They do not compete with each other in meaningful ways. As you say, yes, there is a lot of great utility out there. I can look up how to fix anything in my house on YouTube. That's super cool, and it has made my life tangibly better. But as for advertisements and other sorts of information, the outcome is a lot darker. From the article: Now I regard magazine advertising as a big problem. I really hate it. It overwhelms the copy text, which is usually reduced to a dull, grey little stream trickling its way through enormous glaring billboard-like pages all of which are clamoring to draw your attention to stuff you don't want; and the first thing you have to do when you buy a new magazine is shake it over a bin in order to shed all the coupons, sachets, packets, CDs and free labrador puppies which make them as fat an unwieldy as a grandmother's scrapbook. Tell me, with a straight face, that the overwhelming majority of the modern web isn't the digital form of exactly that.